Could the right to information
clauses in the draft constitution along with the IMMI (International Modern
Media Initiative) proposals to protect journalists, their sources and
whistleblowers help prevent a second crash from happening?

Absolutely. It’s not
enough to have a big [Wikileaks-style] data dump. You have to have people
interested in it that can analyse it and simplify it for the general public to
understand. So if we had this type of legislation before the banking crisis it might
not have prevented it completely but it would have been a lot less severe.

We have legislation
that is not very clear in Iceland about when public workers, the bureaucrats in
the system, have a duty to report or a duty to be silent. It’s not clear right
now because there are so many different regulations about it. Many people have
been waiting for a clarification in law. So now the trend is for whistleblowers
to stay silent.

I don’t think
transparency can completely stop corruption as the temptation to bend the rules
is always great, but when there is more transparency around the laws and who
writes them, more eyes can have a look at it and try to fill in the legal
holes.

People sometimes say there is a
banking secrecy law in Iceland. Is that still in effect?

It’s not really a
banking secrecy law. It’s more like legislation that the banks themselves have
put into place. It is not a particular law. It’s one of the things we’ve tried
to raise awareness about. Whenever the banks claim this is a law, a regulation,
I keep saying to everybody that’s interested in changing the growing distrust
in parliamentary institutions and politicians is that all laws have been made
by people and thus all laws can be undone by all people. What they always do
with something like this, when they claim there is a banking secrecy law, they
say that it’s because of competition and because of international regulations
that we’re part of.

So maybe we need a
really strong international body of people that want to transform these international
trade deals to provide a new grid or new network that might help roll it back.
But it’s actually a lot harder when it comes to these international
corporations that are bound by these international hiding places.

Even though Iceland prosecuted some
of its top bankers after the revolution, is there a sense that things may be
returning to business as usual now the right-wing parties are back in power?

I think in general we
don’t have a big banking bubble now, we have a different kind of bubble because
we did not deal with the problems at the root of it. I don’t think there’s ever
going to be a new banking insanity in Iceland because what happened here was
unheard of because the banking sector expanded so quickly and dramatically
compared to the size of our GDP. But the new bubble is in housing because of
increasing tourism. So the new bubble in Iceland is actually tourism and all
the corruption around that. That’s going to hit the general public the hardest,
there’s going to be a massive mortgage bubble so the price of housing is
expanding really quickly and they’re just building all these luxury flats when
it’s incredibly difficult to be on the rental market. Because Iceland has never
had a proper rental market. So you’d usually only be able to find a place to
rent for about a year and then you’d have to be moving all the time which
eventually pushes you into taking a mortgage which is usually more than you can
deal with. So you go in the grey zone in order to get a mortgage. Now it’s even
worse. It’s never been this bad. Now we have the Italian situation starting in
Iceland where people can’t move away from home. And Icelanders have
traditionally been very proud of leaving home relatively early, standing on
their own feet.

So I think we’re back
to business as usual in a sense because nothing’s really changed because we
never got our new constitution. That was the new hardware, the new firm ground
to stand on and build “New Iceland” on.

Has there been much reform of the
banking sector post-crash?

Well there’s been
some new laws to put some reins on the banks but I think our biggest problem is
that the banks started to offer non-indexed mortgage loans. Indexed mortages
are the most traditional loans in Iceland. You have to refinance with the bank
these un-indexed loans every three or five years. And let’s say there’s an
unprecedented situation, lots of inflation, etc. they can actually raise the
interest. And there is no regulation that says there is a limit to how much
they can raise the interest by. So we’re in a very dangerous limbo situation. I
warned the last government about it. I think it’s impossible to warn the
current government because they don’t give a shit, but I asked them why don’t
they put a ceiling on how much these un-indexed loans can go up in interest.

The thing that I
criticise most about the resurrection of banks if you’re looking for the
long-term is the failure to separate the high street banking from the “casino”
banking. These should have been separated because they have nothing in common
really. The casino banking sector uses the traditional banking sector as their
piggy bank with their fractional reserve systems to make money out of thin air.
That’s not been fixed at all. Actually in Europe or the world it’s not been
fixed at all. Nobody learned anything from the last banking crisis.

It’s interesting that rather than
a big push for banking reform in terms of a grassroots campaign, you guys have
gone for ‘let’s fix democracy first’. That’s an interesting priority ranking.
Most people aren’t thinking in that structural way.

Well, there is this
bible story that says a wise man does not build his house on sand. And one of
the big demands after the crisis was that we would get a new social agreement
to build a new democracy. Our constitution is just a temporary constitution
that we’ve had for 70 years and we’ve done patchwork on it but there’s never
been a holistic approach to create a new constitution in Iceland. We could have
had a chance like South Africa when they created a new constitution at the end
of Apartheid. We tried and it was a beautiful experiment that I thought was
very important but those in power managed to sabotage its reputation by just
constantly hammering that a new constitution should never be ratified in
dispute which was complete bollocks (for more on the dispute manufactured by
the Independence Party see the “An Unexpected Hiccup” section of From
the people to the people, a new constitution) because those in power will
always fight against anything that brings more liberation and more rights to
the public and thwarts their unconditional power. So they will do everything in
their power to stop this democratic process and to make it look unprofessional,
not thought through enough. In their opinion there were not enough people from
the countryside, etc. etc. Of course there were mistakes made in this process.
We were doing this for the first time and of course it was not perfect. But the
spirit of it was perfect. And the spirit was basically that Icelanders wanted
to come out on the other side with a more honest society, with more equality
and transparency.

I’ve been using the
fact our party has been scoring
as the highest, again and again and again, by far in the polls as leverage
to try to get the other parties to come on a journey before next elections
where we agree that the only thing the next government would do would be to
ratify the new constitution and put forward a national referendum on the bid to
see whether people want to carry on with the European Union bid or not then
dissolve the parliament within six months. Six months should be enough to get
the national referendum on the EU bid and fix all the technical problems with
the constitution because there aren’t many and they’re all known. It’s not like
we have to begin from scratch. Then we can have a new parliament based on this
new constitution within nine months.

They’ve shown
interest. Interestingly enough the Social Democrats are the ones that are
dragging their feet. They’re claiming it’s impossible. We’ll see how it goes
but it’s been very interesting to see their reaction to it.

Were they not the main part of
the coalition government that set the constitutional process into action?

Yeah. But they’ve not
been forthcoming. I was speaking to a person who is very influential in the
party. There are differences of opinion about it within the party. This process
can only be done if people are willing to do this and nothing else so that
people who are voting know that this is the only thing they are voting for
actually. So that people are unified that they need a new hardware to put the
new systems in. They are always trying to do patchwork and there is no vision
in this patchwork. Reactionary politics is killing democracies all over the
world and making people distrust this process which is the only process that is
viable if you don’t want to have complete dictatorship.

That will be amazing if you can
pull that off. Presumably we’ll be hearing noises on the street too. There was
a demonstration outside parliament on Tuesday and the mood is obviously getting
interesting again. The fact that the constitution has been frozen can’t be
doing politics much good there. What would you say the mood of the nation is
currently?

People currently are
very disappointed, I think in themselves,
because many of them got fooled into voting for the liars. I think people feel
betrayed, pissed off. None of the promises of prosperity have come through
except for the richest.

I went to the protest
because I am a protest junkie. I really like protests because it’s such a good
way to feel what people are feeling. If you are driven to come out and protest
it’s not only the people there: each person is representing many others. And I
really sense the same dynamics prior to the protests in 2009. I’ve never seen
as many cops. The people in power are really scared. I think I’ve been to
nearly 85% of all protests after the collapse and it will be interesting to see
what happens. I would be surprised if we could get rid of this current
government but you never know. The interesting thing about all revolutions and
uprisings is nobody knows if they are successful or not. Nobody knows when
enough people are sick of it. You never know what the tipping point is. I can
only hope that we can get rid of this government before it does more damage.
But even if they do damage it is important for people to know that laws are
always made by humans and can be undone by humans. But when they destroy the
environment it can be very difficult to take that back.

How strong is the demand for
the new constitution among the people on the streets? Are people seeing that as
having a central importance?

It’s sort of
happening. Like we have this new fish that has been coming over to Iceland for
a while which is mackrell. Those that have been in power in Iceland for a long
time have been gradually been giving their friends and allies […drops out…] So
they put forward a bill for this new fishing quota that is really badly
written. It was obvious that their plan was to give that as well.

And there is a
petition now demanding that the president won’t sign that law because we
haven’t got into the constitution an article that is strong enough, or an
article at all that the nation’s resources should belong to the nation without
a doubt [note: such a clause features in the draft
constitution]. Because of this people started to understand, ‘oh, if we had
got the new constitution then we would not be in this position of having to
plead to the king or the president to not sign this law.’ If we had the new
constitution, actually the nation could stop a dangerous bill like this
[article 65 gives the right for 10% of the population to hold a binding
national referendum on a law passed by the parliament].

You’ve been an MP since 2009
representing firstly the Civic Movement then the Pirate Party. This is a
three-part question! What was the relationship between the protests and the
Civic Movement? How did the Civic Movement end and the Icelandic Pirate Party
start? Then, finally, how have you guys approached working in parliament and
what successes can you point to?

When we created the
Civic Movement it was actually a group of people who were part of a think tank
on what to do after the crisis. I had been a lone protester against the Chinese
government’s human rights abuses against the Tibetans for nine months every
week and did a lot of events around that as well. So I was the person that
people called when the protests were starting asking, ‘Do we need permission to
protest?’ etc. There was a group of people trying to get all the grassroots
groups to work together to make a really big demonstration on 1st
December 2008 – the day when we got our constitution. A couple of big
individuals who were supposed to be organising it pulled out last minute so I
was asked like a day before the big protest to get all the practical stuff
together. So that’s how I became involved in all these different grassroots
initiatives.

I was part of this
Academia group where we would meet every week to discuss what do we need to
create in Iceland in order to prevent another crisis like this from happening.
We held a meeting I think sometime in December where we invited all these
different grassroots groups to come and explain what they thought the top three
priorities that needed to be done in order to make “New Iceland”. All of them
said that there was a need to create a political party or movement to push for
a new constitution written for and by the people of Iceland. We thought that
was really interesting because every single one of them said they thought that
was a priority. So we started to create bylaws for a group that was called
“Solidarity - a coalition of the grassroots movements.” I was sort of a prime
mover in this, I don’t know why. There were other groups doing similar stuff.
All of a sudden I was invited to this meeting eight weeks prior to the
elections. And there they created the Civic Movement and I was asked to be the
vice chair. I agreed but then on my way back home I thought, ‘What the hell,
they’ve created a political group with a pyramid structure and I like
horizontalism and I’m an anarchist! Eventually, maybe two or three weeks later
I introduced horizontalism and asked that we would not have leaders or vice
leaders and I got it through.

The aim of this
political movement was to do a hit and run, go inside really quickly, open the
windows and explain to people how things work inside the parliament, fight
against Icesave being socialised and get the new constitution going and the
injustice that people felt by losing their houses and mortgages would be
rectified. So we had a very simple checklist of political goals

We did not want any
politicians to run with us. It was sort of like Podemos. It was just a
coalition of all these different groups. We didn’t really know each other much
as you can imagine. I was for example not going to run in a front seat, as
number one in my constituency but we could only find one woman out of six
constituencies to take leadership and I felt it was really bad to create a
political movement with no women in the front. So I last minute offered to lead
my constituency if I would get support for it or if I was asked to do it. Eight
weeks later we got 7.2%, we were in parliament and we didn’t know anything
about it. It was very interesting because you could use your ignorance to
change things. So we were sort of activists inside there. We were an offspring
of the protests.

There were of course
lots of arguments and drama when some people got in and some people didn’t. So
you get all the stuff that we had to push behind us when we were campaigning.
It was ugly and boring and horrible. So it ended up with the Citizens Movement
splitting in half. Half of the group went into a new political movement just
called The Movement. We took all the agenda of the Civic Movement and the
parliamentarians but left the money behind. We worked on the agenda that we
were elected on because we felt if we were to carry on with all this internal
drama we would never be able to do our job as parliamentarians. That was very
hard because we lost almost all our
following and it took a long time just to win back trust.

And while all this
was happening I happened to be invited to speak as the only geek in the
parliament exactly a year after we did the big protest in 2008, on 1 December
2009 at a conference hosted by the Digital Freedom Society. A couple of guys
from a very unknown organisation called Wikileaks were speaking there. They
were talking about this really brilliant idea that Iceland could resurrect
involving becoming a safe haven for freedom of information, expression and
speech with a focus on privacy. And I approached them after it and said, ‘Hey, why
don’t we do this? I’m a parliamentarian and I think this would be a really
great way to come up with a vision for where Iceland could be heading after
this really embarrassing attempt to become the greatest banking nation.’ So we
started to work on this and it later became known as IMMI the International Modern Media Initiative.

What was very unique
about this and what has been an incredible guideline as a politician is that I
learned that the quickest path to change is to look at the best laws from other
countries that work. Not try to write everything from scratch or come up with
the most original idea. But to actually look at who’s doing the correct things
to improve whatever you want to improve. And I had access to some of the
greatest minds in this field in order to create this vision.

And even though I was
in the smallest opposition party I somehow managed to rally the entire
parliament with me on this. I got people from all parties to support this
resolution, very powerful people and eventually I got it through. And the
reason why that worked – and it was a relatively radical idea – was because I
did it very quickly. I was aware of the Shock Doctrine. You have crisis, the
window of opportunity is very, very short. You have to move fast. And the
constitution was a victim of slowness. I completely blame it on the
governmental parties for a lack of wisdom on how to implement change in times
of crisis.

So, in all this IMMI
process I felt that people in the Movement didn’t really understand the urgency
and importance of it. Because it’s a constant thing: even if you get a
resolution done and a government starts to work on it, you have to make sure
that they do it as instructed, which they didn’t, they were slow with it. So
it’s a constant lobby to have it done.

So I created IMMI to
work on both the IMMI resolution and to carry on this international quest for
the best practice in this field and share them. I was so frustrated with the
lack of enthusiasm and interest in it by other political allies. So at an IMMI
board meeting I said why don’t we just create a Pirate Party because Pirate
Parties around the world had been using IMMI as a guideline and I felt people
understood the importance of this at a deep level. That was how the Icelandic
Pirate Party started.

And the reason why
The Movement didn’t carry on was it was written in our code that we had to
dissolve the Party – because it was just a hit and run remember – if we did or
did not get our agenda done within two terms. And we felt that when the
constitution was stung with the thorn of the Big Sleep that we had no reason to
carry on.

What progress has there been so
far with IMMI? Has it translated into practical things that have strengthened
the environment for investigative journalism and truth-telling in Iceland?

Yes but not enough.
When the source protection laws were being done they used the IMMI laws which
were based on what they have in Belgium. But the information laws are really
not good enough. They are much better than they intended to have thave but they
are not as good as IMMI requires.

Lots of companies are
selling to their clients that are hosting with them that these laws about
intermediary [i.e. internet server] protection and so forth are already made.
Which is not true. This is a huge research project that the Institute has been
doing with people around the world to find out how we can protect
intermediaries because it is so important but we have not had any laws passed
yet. I couldn’t event get the bloody parliament to agree on removal of data
retention after all these rulings that have been happening in the EU.

So we’ve prepared the
laws and now finally there is a really awesome, productive, very focused
steering group in the ministry that is writing up the IMMI laws which means
that, even if they’re not all ratified now, in the next couple of years if we
have a proper government that understands the importance of it, or a bigger
Pirate Party these can be processed very quickly because it’s had a long
brewing time both in Iceland and elsewhere. And if the government puts forward
laws, the Parliament usually processes it very quickly.

So that’s why I put
forward a law explaining why we need to remove data retention, so now they have
that prepared for them. So it’s happening, slowly, very slowly.

This article is published in association with the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, which is seeking to contribute to public knowledge about effective democracy-strengthening by leading a discussion on openDemocracy about what approaches work best. Views expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of WFD. WFD’s programmes bring together parliamentary and political party expertise to help developing countries and countries transitioning to democracy.

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